health

Flip Flops

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

This work was originally published in “Barely South Review” about twelve years ago. It has since been anthologized and often pops up around 911.

“Death plucks my ear and says, ‘Live. I am coming. Live now.'”

–Virgil

I went to the local hardware in Hartfield and bought a sickle—a huge rake-like piece of
steel only instead of a rake at the end there is a double-edged sharp, wavy blade made to rip
through branches, thick weeds and other bone-like growth. Eighteen dollars.

The front of my property is wooded, and on a few acres toward the river, I spent some
time clearing out brush and unwanted vines. I piled it up to haul away, but before that could
happen, other more tenacious weeds—small trees really—took over the area. Some I pulled out,
some I mowed, but I couldn’t grasp to tug out the tougher ones—so the sickle. One warm
morning while alone I put on shorts and flip flops, grabbed the sickle and walked the six hundred
of so feet through the woods to swing away at a small grove. None would rip out easily, so I
aimed for the fences, came down from my right with major-league force and tore through the
vines like an axe through balsa. I attacked one after another, muscles taught so that sweat came
fast, and I made progress. Then I stepped to swing at what looked like a thick, knotty growth at
the bottom of the stump. It was a Virginia creeper vine. Sometimes these monsters look rooted
but aren’t. But what do I know; I’m from New York. So I swung at it like A-Rod. The blade
passed through as if the weed were nothing more than a figment of my imagination, and with all
my energy plus a good deal of inertia, the metal blade ripped into my left ankle.

I like flip-flops. I grew up on the beaches from Long Island to Virginia, so I’ve been
wearing them since I’m a kid. I actually had one pair for ten years, sometimes rigged with a thick
paperclip to hold them together. My feet from April to October have a thick white stripe across
the tops seen only when my flip flops are off. I teach in them. I walk in them. I even mow the
lawn and chop wood in them. Despite what many have said, they are not the cause of the blade
Tarantino-ing my ankle. I don’t remember my foot slipping. I do remember almost not going out
to cut the underbrush to begin with because I couldn’t find my flip flops. What a different story
this would have been had I not come across them on the back porch.

When it happened, blood exploded like water in a hose that’s been held back by bending
and then released. My ankle, foot and flops looked as if dipped in bright red paint. I hobbled the
six hundred feet to the back of the house to wash off the wound, bandaged it, then went back out
to cut more wood; I was wired from adrenaline, my ankle didn’t hurt too badly, and to be honest
I had a lot to do.

That night I iced it. I kept it clean. I was fine. Really.

A week later my leg was pitting a bit when I pushed my thumb into my shin. Excess fluid
I figured. Prior to the whacking, I had been running up to eight miles a day, prepping for the
Rock and Roll Half, so one evening when I was feeling a bit more hyper than usual, and the
swelling moved to both legs—a feat I could not comprehend from injuring one ankle, but I don’t
have a medical degree—I stopped at Kroger and spotted a blood pressure machine. This can’t be
right, I thought, when the first reading came up 270 over 190. I did it two more times and both
readings came pretty close to the same. At the checkout I let them know the machine was
broken. We all laughed at my numbers—even the bagger laughed and put the laundry detergent
on top of the bread. It was that funny.

The next day, worried about my ankle, I washed off my flip flops and went to the doctor.
He took my blood pressure. Again. Again. He asked why I was stupid enough to wear flip flops
while doing yard work. I pointed out I wacked myself above where any shoe would have come
anyway. He asked if I were doing cocaine, heroin, or any other substance, asked if I had
shortness of breath, dizziness, if I had thrown up, fell down, or otherwise felt corpselike. He took
my blood pressure again. He asked how long I felt hyper. “Years,” I said, and he took my
pressure again. Then he sent me to the emergency room. Average BP—260 over 175.
Tests. IVs. Tests. On and on it went for several hours. Nurses came, two doctors stopped
by, some punk there to visit a friend who had overdosed came by to check out my vitals because
my blood pressure was the talk of the ward. The nurses upped the meds. Finally the doctors said
based upon my blood vessels behind my eyes and various tests, my blood pressure had
apparently been that high for probably some years, and that if it wasn’t for the fact I’m totally
healthy otherwise with excellent results from blood and other tests, I’d have had a major stroke.

I asked the cause. The doctor shrugged. Genetics; in a high stress situation for far too
long; a combination, he said. They brought it down to 190 over 95 and sent me home with meds
to bring it back to normal. They told me to keep exercising and that because of my medicines I
could do the marathon, but to be clear, I’m going to be very weak for awhile until I adjust to a
life where I’m not pumped on triple doses of double shots coursing through my veins.

A few weeks later at a follow up where my pressure was at 110 over 70 the doctor told
me in complete agreement with the cardiologist and another doctor, had I not gone in, I’d have
most likely had a major stroke trying to run the half, and probably would be dead. I asked why I
didn’t have one while doing the eight miles a day prior to the Great Sickle Incident, and he was
quite professional about it: I don’t know, he said. I really don’t know. You should have. Good
thing you wacked your ankle, he said.

Yeah, thank God I wacked my ankle. And I thought how often that happens. Good thing I went back for the keys. Good thing I stopped for coffee. Good thing you kept me on the phone, or I’d have been at that intersection just at that moment.

“Good thing I watched Monday Night football on the 10th and overslept: I work on the
85th floor and I’d have been right there,” the stock broker said in the street to the television crew.
As the towers tumbled, he counted his blessings.

Good thing Larry Silverstein, owner of the lease of the World Trade Centers, has a wife
who made him go to his dermatologist appointment that morning instead of yet another meeting
in the North Tower.

Good thing Chef Michael Lomanoco of “Windows on the World” broke his glasses and
had to stop at Lenscrafters that morning to get them fixed.

Good thing Lara Clarke stopped to talk to her friend, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, in a
chance meeting down in the village that morning making her late for her job on the 77th floor.

Thank God singer Patti Austin, booked on flight 93, had to leave Boston a day early
because her mother had a stroke and she had to get back to San Francisco on the 10th instead. “I
went back and forth all day about when to leave,” she said.Thank God actress Julie Stoffer and her boyfriend had a wailing fight that morning and
she missed Flight 11.

Actor Mark Wahlburg is still haunted by that same Flight 11 to LA, which he missed at
the last minute when an 11th hour invitation to a film festival sent him to Toronto instead. He has
nightmares thinking about who took his place on the flight. He would have been sitting next to
Family Guy creator Seth McFarland who also missed that flight when his manager gave him the
wrong boarding time and he was fifteen minutes late. He, too, still has bad dreams, he says. But
thank God, he says.

It’s chance. It’s the phone call, the caught light, the traffic backup. It’s changing your mind. It’s
sticking to the plan. It’s oversleeping, insomnia, an upset stomach. It’s a few seconds. It’s the
wrong shoes. It’s the stroke of luck.

The Almost

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

I posted a comment today that simply said, “I’ve lost interest in absolutely everything. Almost.”

I wasn’t kidding. Sometimes I joke or lead on, sometimes I post things in a broad stroke as an inside joke to someone out there who gets it and everyone else is like, “Huh?” And sometimes, once in a while, I mean it. That’s this time, now. I’ve truly lost interest in absolutely everything.

The news has stolen so much of my time I feel like I should be ten years younger but for the endless endless ENDLESS barrage of manure pouring out of left and right and mainstream and radical outlets, filling the empty spaces of life with reports on the childish behavior of world leaders. So I turn to see what’s going on around the world and I see children dying in droves in the Middle East, but nowadays in a world filled with bitter and anxiety-ridden people ready to snap at anyone who speaks, those that point out the tragedy of dying Palestinian children are called anti-Semitic when they just are trying to say no matter what else you feel about land rights and terrorist organizations, at the very least we should be able to agree that tens of thousands of children should not die from war and starvation, right? Right?!

And my beloved St Petersburg is a place I’ll never go again because two or three men at the top decided to change the lives of the entire nation–two nations actually–so I turn my attention to students and classes since I stumbled into that career, but everyone is cheating with AI claiming it doesn’t make a difference since the work is done and the essay is written and I did the same thing when I was their age by using a calculator instead of working out the math on paper and it is nearly impossible to prove anyway. So I look toward some planned trips I had with some groups of people, but when they fell through and I let them know, I received mostly belligerent, nasty, attacking emails from the same people because they decided not to read my emails. People suck. Come on, you know it. They just suck.

So I turn my attention to my work, but one book project for a publisher in New York got pushed off a year, and the other book project for my publisher in Texas is going well and launches this Christmas, and while I think it is some of my best work and the endorsement from writers I respect is unprecedented, it will never be what I want it to be because it is so personal, so significant to me, that it took forty-five years to tell the story and I’ll never be satisfied, and letting it go to the publisher was like watching the main character die all over again.

I’m exhausted. No. That’s not right. Fatigued isn’t close either.

Numb. The worst kind of numb; the numb that feels good and makes it hard to give a rat’s ass about anything at all except being numb. Exhausted and fatigued can be bad. Numb can be dangerous.

But I had a few moments of “excellent” in the past few months. In The Netherlands. At Spirit Lake, Utah, and with my son hiking various trails along the Chesapeake. But I’ve lost interest in almost everything else. True story.

So I decided to forget about the news and the world situations and the AI essays and the publishing delays and writing disappointments and instead just focus on the Almost.

We spend much too little time focusing on the things that we do find interest in, we are too often held hostage by the news cycle which only pisses us off. This cannot be healthy. So I’ve decided to save myself. It might be one thing. Sometimes you might be close to a tragedy but there is one thing–perhaps a child, perhaps an event, maybe some faith–that keeps you going anyway.

So I turned to the things that motivate me from inside somewhere.

Shit.

I wish I could remember what they were.

vestibular schwannoma

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

A stone in water.

The overture of Swan Lake.

Those brief piano notes that start “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.”

How “Bob” and “Mom” sound so much alike in a busy mall.

A drink being poured over ice in a glass.

Ice in a glass.

An oboe coming in high, one note falling in slowly like silver rain, fading away and handing the note off to a French horn.

The way my friend Zhora stood on the rocks of the Gulf of Finland and played his flute for us, the Beethoven notes slipping off across the water under a midnight sun. The whispers of everyone about his playing. Champagne.

A few days ago, chickadees hatched in the birdhouse near the woods. When I am at my desk upstairs, I can hear them chirping away for the mom who seems to be in constant flight from the small hole in the eave of the birdhouse to the lawn and then back. They’re hungry. And they’re loud. Almost as loud as hummingbirds’ wings.

I have pretty good hearing.

Snowmelt dripping from a branch. The muffled sound of tires on a winter street. Rain on a canvas awning. Rain on the skylight above me.

Dizziness sometimes. Imbalance occasionally. Tinnitus.

A racquet solidly making contact with a tennis ball. Someone turning pages at a table in a library.

Geese in flight at dusk headed for the river.

My father’s deep voice. My mother’s laugh, which is more of an inhale.

Burgers sizzling over coals.

Rigging.

Some mornings there would be some leakage from my left ear. Could be anything, they said. I heard them clearly; they could have whispered. Three doctors in two weeks; well, two, one two times. I have an acoustic neuroma. “Shouldn’t I be losing my hearing?” “No. Well, I suppose it could rupture, but not always.” Not always.

When I’d watch television with my father, whose own hearing had diminished in his final years, he’d keep the volume at 35-40. For perspective, when he left the room, I lowered it to 5, and even then, it still seemed loud. The joke was I knew which episode of Law and Order he was watching when I turned the car onto his street. If I’m trying to get work done at my desk I put on headphones just to muffle the noise coming up from the river or down from the highway or in from the trees where squirrels scatter and chase. When they are scared they sound like a ball pein hammer, and herons sound like they have something stuck in their throats and they’re trying to hack it out. Osprey and hawks have their own similar high-pitched sound, and eagles take it up an octave.

Some surgeon makes an incision above the ear in the skull bone, uncovers the internal auditory canal, and removes the neuroma. Takes about the length of the entire production of Gizelle, or the extent of all Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. I tell my doctor I don’t want to only be listening to John Cage’s 4’33” the rest of my life, but I don’t think she heard me.

Water talks to me too, usually at night. The river is calmer in the evening and the slow, methodic lap at the land is nearly imperceptible but lasts a while as the dripping lip of the water bends on itself, running down the beach. I sit on the rocks sometimes and listen as it folds away, holding on, eventually giving in to one last break. On the marsh shore peepers are chanting their own scripture.

Acoustic guitar strings, a piano, pool water splashing, the voice of an old friend, waterfalls, foghorns, a baseball slapping into a mitt, a cat’s purr, children aimlessly laughing. And odd sounds too; a dryer spinning, a plow, a lawnmower starting up, cups and plates hitting each other in the kitchen of a diner. Swirling conversations from people on beach blankets, kids calling, music floating on the breakers. Champagne glasses meeting on some western salt bed at twilight, and a small plane moves along the dry lake about what sounded like a mile or so away.

It’s a gumball. It’s basically a small sack of nothingness camped out deep inside my ear canal. I was supposed to fly next month, and I was told in no uncertain terms not to do so until at least sixty days after it is removed. It is benign, but if it explodes (they say rupture, but we’ve taken to calling it an explosion, with images of ear canal parts landing on the person next to me on the plane. I suggested she wear a smock; she suggested I wear a football helmet), I could go deaf, at the very least in my left ear; more likely both.

When I am reviewing my work, I read aloud to myself; I can hear the cadence, the meter, how lyrical it sounds, much more accurately than if I just read it on the page.  

Because writing, when it is done right, is music; it can be recited and sung like hymns by choirs; it should hang in the air like winter-breath, and it should worm into someone’s mind and play in there all day, birthing ideas and pressing them into some new direction, ever present, a small presence you don’t even know about but is there, waiting.